Phonological Representations in Children with Articulation and Phonological Disorders

Objectives: This study aims to examine underlying difficulties of children with articulation/ phonological disorders in their speech process by comparing the quality of phonological representations (QPR) and the ability to encode phonological representations to that of normal children. Methods: A phonological representation judgment task and a non-word repetition task were conducted in order to compare QPR and their encoding ability in phonological representations, respectively. With regard to the task of judgment in phonological representations, the scores of correct responses and reaction times were examined. Regarding the non-word repetition task, the differences in the degree of repeated accuracy and the percentage of error types were analyzed. Then, the correlation between the two tasks was analyzed for each group. Results: In the phonological representations judgment task, there were significant differences between the groups according to correct response scores but there were no significant differences between the groups in reaction time. In the task of non-word repetition, the degree of repetition accuracy for children with articulation/ phonological disorders was significantly low as compared to that of normal children. However, there were no significant differences in the percentage of error types between the two groups. In addition, there was a positive correlation between the two tasks of both groups. Conclusion: The children with articulation/phonological disorders had less distinct and less accurate QPR than normal children, and the former's ability to encode phonological representations were lower than the latter's ability quantitatively but not qualitatively.